When Power Confuses Equity for a Threat

Last week, I was in New York City sitting with two Jewish leaders, talking through the polarization tearing through the Jewish community. My response was something like: “If you’ve always had power, equity feels like a threat.” Change feels threatening, not because anything is being “taken,” but because the ground is finally shifting toward balance.

For those who have always had the power of opinion, whose voices have always been heard, whose perspectives have always been centered, it can be jarring when that’s no longer automatic. When you’ve stayed in your lane, in insulated communities, and haven’t been around a real diversity of thought, it’s genuinely shocking to discover that other voices are now being heard just as loudly. Maybe louder. And that registers as a threat rather than a correction.

I’ve seen this throughout my rabbinic career. The fact that there are now more Black and brown and queer and trans and female rabbis has prompted ongoing attempts to delegitimize us: to question the authority of any rabbi who isn’t cisgender, white, and male. I’ve watched this play out again and again. I’ve experienced this directly. Here’s the thing: there has always been a diversity of opinions on nearly every issue in the Jewish community. It’s just that now, many of those historically marginalized voices are finally being heard.

Often, when I’m thinking about something, the universe hands me the perfect example without my even asking:

Yesterday, I saw a clip of former Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz at the Jewish Federations of North America General Assembly. Hurwitz complained that Holocaust education has “backfired” because it taught young people to “fight the big powerful people hurting the weak people.” She lamented that young Jews are seeing “carnage in Gaza” and applying that moral framework, and suggested the problem isn’t the violence itself, but that people can see it through social media.

Let’s be clear about what she’s actually saying: The problem isn’t what’s happening. It’s that young people can see it. The issue isn’t the carnage; it’s the loss of narrative control. She’s not disagreeing with the moral lesson that we should stand against the powerful harming the vulnerable. She’s upset that people are applying it universally. The lesson was supposed to stay contained, meant only for certain victims.

This is what it looks like when people who’ve always controlled the narrative suddenly don’t. Hurwitz frames this as a “generational divide,” but that’s a misdiagnosis. Younger Jews aren’t rejecting Jewish values. They’re taking them seriously. They learned tzedek, tzedek tirdof (”justice, justice you shall pursue”), Tikkun Olam (our obligation to repair the world), and “do not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor”—these values actually mean something to them. They were taught “Never Again” and they believe it applies to everyone. The divide isn’t generational; it’s between those who see Jewish ethics as universal and those who see them as exclusive. When someone with that much institutional power experiences the widening of moral concern as a threat, when visibility itself becomes the enemy, that tells you everything about who has been centered and who has been erased.

For generations in this country, certain groups have moved through the world assuming safety, opportunity, and belonging as their birthright. That assumption became so normalized it turned invisible. It just felt like “how things are.” So when the ground shifts toward actual balance, when more people gain access to what was always reserved for a few, it registers as loss rather than correction.

But that discomfort is not harm. That tension is not persecution. That feeling is what happens when the world stops centering you.

Equity is not a threat. It is shared dignity. It’s what happens when systems shift from hoarding to sharing, when safety stops depending on identity, when belonging is no longer rationed.

This work stirs fear not because equity is dangerous, but because it exposes a foundational myth: that dominance equals stability. It reveals that what many defended as “tradition” was simply structural imbalance, and imbalance was never going to hold.

Equity is not a modern invention. It’s Torah. It’s the demand that we build a world where every person’s divine image is honored, not just the ones historically centered. Our sages taught Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh: all of us are responsible for one another. And responsibility only works if everyone has access, voice, and dignity. Communal solidarity is impossible without equity.

So when people respond to equity with fear or rage, I see it clearly: They’re mourning the loss of unexamined advantage, not the loss of dignity.

But here’s what I also know: People come to their beliefs and ideas from their backgrounds, experiences, and social location in life all of which shape how they see the world. The work of building equity requires us to listen across difference, to understand where fear is coming from even as we refuse to let it stop the work. We can acknowledge that the loss of dominance feels destabilizing for some while still insisting that destabilization is not harm.

And the work right now is to keep saying it plainly: Equity doesn’t take from you. Equity makes sure everyone can stand. That’s not a threat. It’s the whole point.